TV Tuesday: Golden Boy needs some polishing

From the cheap, tacky music to the seen-it-a-thousand-times-before shootout involving street cops and a deranged hostage-taker, the opening seconds of the unimaginatively titled Golden Boy make this new TV crime drama look like just another generic cop show.

Within minutes, though, the scene jumps ahead in time. The wet-behind-the-ears patrol officer, played by Bedlam’s Theo James, is now the youngest police commissioner in the history of New York City. He stands in the glass penthouse of a gleaming skyscraper, a prince of the city dressed in a fine silk suit, looking over his domain with a combination of smug self-satisfaction and unchecked ambition. Golden Boy asks how he got there, why he rose through the ranks so quickly and whether, deep down, he’s a good guy or bad guy.

Theo James, at left, Kevin Alejandro and Chi McBride in Golden Boy.

Left unasked is the question of whether anyone will want to watch a TV crime drama about a hero who is either good at the job or running a con. On one level, Golden Boy is just another cookie-cutter TV cop show, from the home of Blue Bloods.

Golden Boy wants to be something more, though. By tackling themes like ethics, morality and the corrosive nature of power, Golden Boy demands to be taken seriously. It wants to be more than just another cop show, but that’s exactly what is, right down to the familiar TV faces seen in countless other cop shows — Bonnie Somerville, Chi McBride, Richard Kind, Holt McCallany, Kevin Alejandro, etc. — and familiar TV tropes like the wise, world-weary older partner (McBride) and pushy, ambitious junior (Somerville).

Theo James, at left, with Kevin Alejandro in Golden Boy.

In Tuesday’s opener, viewers learn that Walter William Clark Jr. (James) was abandoned as a child and grew up on the street. He used his street smarts to qualify for the police academy, worked three years as a beat cop and landed on the fast track to advancement after performing numerous heroics in the line of duty. A career fast-track doesn’t always guarantee a stable home life, of course, and he’s the sole support for his troubled younger sister, who’s still in her teens.

Golden Boy is typical, undemanding network fare. It plays like a younger, hipper version of Blue Bloods, with a reasonably likable actor playing a morally ambiguous character who’s hard to like one minute, easy to relate to the next.

Golden Boy is the kind of TV drama that asks little of its audience, and delivers little in return. The dialogue rarely gets more demanding than, “So … you a master politician or just a savvy cop?” It’s not as smart, hard-hitting or streetwise as Southland, but then Southland was made for a sophisticated, adult audience watching a sophisticated, adult cable channel. Golden Boy, despite its stab at moral ambiguity, is distinctly ordinary. One can answer the phone, go to the bathroom, help the kids with their homework, come back to the TV and be able to pick up the story in a heartbeat. The background music is relentless, loud and obtrusive, and is the kind of music designed to tell the viewer how to feel, in the unlikely event one has lost track of the plot.

Golden Boy feels tired and dated but, as the weekly ratings show, tired and dated is often exactly what the audience wants. It’ll be a hit! (CTV, CBS, 10 ET/PT, 8 MT)

Three to See

• Women’s rights advocate Dyllan McGee’s three-hour program Makers: Women Who Make America is wildly ambitious, overly ambitious even, but worth watching just the same. Makers profiles influential women from entertainment, politics, sports and other fields who broke societal stereotypes of the times and left a lasting legacy for the younger women who followed. Makers includes personal testimonials from Hillary Rodham Clinton, Gloria Steinem, Billie Jean King and Ellen DeGeneres, among others. (PBS, 8 ET/PT)

• Here’s a cast reunion you probably weren’t expecting to see any time soon, or ever. The gang from My Name is Earl — including Jason Lee, Jaime Pressly, Ethan Suplee, Nadine Velazquez and Eddie Steeples — play next-door neighbours who throw a surprise birthday party for young Hope in an expanded, hour-long episode of Raising Hope. But wait, there’s more. Hilary Duff appears as Sabrina’s new friend, who — surprise! — who happens to be Jimmy’s old high-school girlfriend. Complications, complications. (Citytv, Fox, 8 ET/PT, 9 MT)

• Seth Rogen appears in The Mindy Project as Mindy’s (Mindy Kaling) first kiss from their time together at Jewish summer camp, in an episode called The One That Got Away. (Citytv, Fox, 9:30 ET/PT, 10:30 MT)

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile